What Is Creatine? How Does It Work? What Are The Benefits?

The International Society of Sports Nutrition claims that creatine is the most efficient ergogenic (performance booster) nutritional supplement available for athletes. Creatine enhances the capacity to exercise more and have lean body mass during training.

What is Creatine?

Creatine is a molecule that can quickly produce energy with the end result of supporting cellular function. Creatine is medically demonstrated to be a safe product.

What creatine does is to store high-energy phosphate groups and transform into phosphocreatine. During stressful periods, phosphocreatine liberates this particular energy in order to help cellular function.

Although creatine is produced by the body, it can also be found in foods like eggs, fish, meat and some diary.

How does Creatine work?

According to studies, creatine seems to have an effect on weight. Due to water retention, the overall weight increases in people who respond to creatine supplements.

It is a demonstrated fact that people who cannot produce endogenous creatine experience mental retardation. In large amounts, creatine can act as a cure for Alzheimer disease, because it has the ability to partially alleviate the neurological decrease.

Vegetarians and vegans have a diet with low amounts of creatine. For this reason, their overall well-being will increase with creatine supplements.

Thanks to its ability to work as a reserve of energy, creatine diminishes neuron death generated by the MPTP toxin, one of the causes which can produce effects similar to Parkinson’s disease.

Creatine is also used for curing depression. Oral ingestion of a certain amount of creatine leads to anti-depressive effects, if the treatment is followed over a period of eight weeks.

Creatine benefits

Creatine may help drug rehabilitation; it also has the ability to diminish symptoms of brain trauma, such as tiredness, headaches, dizziness. However, after comparing drug abuse with brain injury, there are no studies which show that creatine has the medical ability to assist drug rehabilitation.

Irrespective of the correlation between creatine and drug abuse, the former has been demonstrated to boost learning and memory. Especially when talking about vegetarians or vegans, who lack in dietary creatine, this molecule can enhance cognition and speed of reaction.

As far as hormones are concerned, creatine has been demonstrated to influence androgen levels. After three weeks of creatine treatment, a study shows that if used along with Beta-Alanine, there will be an increase in the testosterone levels. The only thing one has to worry about is that a bigger dose of creatine can diminish the enhancement of testosterone levels.